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By Cecilia KangThe Washington Post • Monday April 14, 2014 1:19 AM

Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoAP FILE PHOTOGoogle works hard to advance the careers of female and minority employees, but it has run into barriers it didn’t expect, said Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations.

Four years ago, Google was confronted with a troubling stat: Its male engineers were getting
promoted at far higher rates than female employees.

Google could not understand why women were not going for better titles and higher pay when it
had a system where anyone could apply for a promotion. That volunteer system was exactly the
problem, said Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations.

Bock pointed to two studies on gender inequality in schools and in business:

• Girls don’t raise their hands as often as boys when answering math problems, even though they
have a higher rate of accuracy when they do.

• Women don’t offer up their ideas as often as men in business meetings, even though observers
say their thoughts are often better than the many offered by their male colleagues.

Those academic findings pointed to the problem at Google: Female engineers were not speaking up
for their own promotions. So Bock tried an experiment. Alan Eustace, one of the heads of
engineering, sent an email to his staff describing the two studies and reminding them it was time
to apply for promotions.

Immediately, the application rate for women soared and the rate of women who received promotions
was higher than for male engineers.

“The data were clear,” Bock said. “If we tried to have a small nudge by simply presenting
information, it could fix part of the problem. We prefer this to a bureaucratic, top-down
approach."

In a recent interview, Bock talked about what keeps him up at night. Edited excerpts:

Q:
What worries you most in hiring?

A: Software engineers are always hard to find. Very few people from diverse socioeconomic
backgrounds and women. In recruiting African-American computer-science Ph.D.s, my team told me this
year they did pretty well. They captured about 50 percent of all black Ph.D.s in computer science.
But they said there were four, and two stayed in academia. So of the available two, we hired one.
My heart broke inside when I heard that. We have scholarships and programs and partnerships with
universities like Howard University on computer science. But it’s a problem.

The other big category is security experts. With the Edward Snowden revelations about the
National Security Agency, every company is after these folks. You need security experts for
applications, networks, rapid-response teams, security-breach experts. There is a market demand for
about 30,000 security engineers. To give you perspective, at Google, we have 250 working for us,
and we run a lot of data.

Q:
Have you encountered more suspicion toward Google after the Snowden leaks on NSA
surveillance?

A: I haven’t seen it from candidates. One of the challenges is that we disclose everything we
are legally allowed to disclose, but some things you are not allowed to disclose. We are asked, “
How is there not more?” But we say the law prevents us from telling you.